(continuing the story of Filling the Void)

After the original fiber installation, I think Filling the Void went through two or three more iterations.  For one of them, an artist in residence made solid panels on which they printed photos of youth, so the face filled a grid space, and they filled the whole thing with that, which was pretty powerful. 

There was one where it was also a similar idea–they used solid panels, but they were mirror-like, somehow some kind of reflective… and there were drawings on them as well. That was very cool too. On one side there were sequin-like things, reflective things that would move in the wind and they would attach those to the grid too.

And then they decided to do a major expansion of YouthLink, redo the existing building, tear some of it down, add multi-story housing, and redo everything.  

Basically, I was informed that Filling the Void was going to be torn down, and they hadn’t included it in any way in the new plans, and so I said, well, that sucks.  The whole idea… I said, it’s also an opportunity because the whole thing is supposed to change, and here you are undergoing this huge change. So it would be totally great to try to change this piece somehow–that’s the whole nature of it, that it keeps changing.  And so we went through some options, trying to recycle the piece–like at the bare minimum, recycle the materials. That’s not very exciting, but at least it’s something. But then transform it into something else. There were a few ideas floating around, and it was kind of impractical, to take that and–it wouldn’t fit on the new site plan.  So we decided to come up with new pieces that were kind of in the same spirit as the old one but worked with the new building.  

So now we’ve built Filling the Void II, and the big billboard-like panel grid became towers, vertical towers, also of steel and mesh. They will also be transformed over time.

[Coming soon: the impact of Filling the Void]

filling the void, Minneapolis, public art